Genome-wide association study of therapeutic response to statin drugs in cardiovascular disease

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is one of the main causes of death in the world. The increased level of blood cholesterol is significantly correlated to CVD incidents. Statins are a group of drugs that decrease the synthesis of cholesterol in the liver by inhibiting the final enzyme of the pathway named HMG-CoA reductase. Several investigations showed that different patients give different responses to the administration of statin drugs according to their genetic background. In this research study, using Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) data analysis methods, such as the SimpleM statistical approach and genomic connection matrix, we tried to discover the novel candidate SNPs that were involved in response to statin drugs. The investigation was carried out using 3,221 cardiovascular patients' data about genotypes and phenotypes of two important parameters including total cholesterol, and LDL level, in response to statin administration. Functional annotation of nearest genes to candidate SNPs was also carried out by using comprehensive databases and tools such as BioMart-Ensembl, UCSC, NCBI, and WebGestalt software. Our results represented eight novel SNPs (rs10820084, rs4803750, rs10989887, rs1966503, rs17502794, rs10785232, rs484071, rs4785621) significantly associated with statin response in different individual cardiovascular patients for the first time. In addition, the groups of genes that are close to the SNPs were also represented and evaluated in detail. Our results illustrated that some of the genes such as BAAT, BCL3, and CMTM6 have a direct functional impact on cholesterol level or LDL biosynthesis which confirmed the effects of neighbor SNPs on the response to statin drugs. Today, finding the loci, genes, and molecular mechanisms involved in the response to drugs is of great importance in pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine.